Wimbledon Teenager Sells Summly for $30 million

London schoolboy Nick D'Aloisio has no plans to give up his studies for a job at Yahoo's London offices.

The 17-year-old has just sold his smartphone news app Summly to Yahoo for a reported $30 million.

The terms of the sale, four months after Summly was launched for the iPhone, have not been disclosed and D'Aloisio, who is still studying for school exams while joining Yahoo as its youngest employee, was not saying.

D'Aloisio said he had not expected much response from big companies when he first started. He also said he was the majority owner of Summly and would now invest the money from the sale, though his age imposes legal limits for now on his access to it.

D'Aloisio, who lives in the prosperous London suburb of Wimbledon, highlights the support of family and school, which gave him time off, but also, critically, the ideas that came with enthusiastic financial backers.

He had first dreamt up the mobile software while revising for a history exam two years ago, going on to create a prototype of the app that distils news stories into chunks of text readable on small smartphone screens.

He was inspired, he said, by the frustrating experience of trawling through Google searches and separate websites to find information when revising for the test.

"Trimit" was an early version of the app, which is powered by an algorithm that automatically boils down articles to about 400 characters.

It caught the eye of Horizons Ventures, a venture capital firm owned by Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing, which put in 250,000 U.S. dollars.

That investment attracted other celebrity backers, among them Hollywood actor Ashton Kutcher, British broadcaster Stephen Fry, artist Ono, the widow of Beatle John Lennon, and News Corp media mogul Murdoch.

That all added up to maximum publicity when Summly launched in November 2012, but the backers brought more than just cash for an app that has been downloaded close to a million times.

D'Aloisio taught himself to code at age 12 after Apple's App Store was launched, creating several apps including "Facemood," a service which analyzed sentiment to determine the moods of Facebook users, and music discovery service "SongStumblr."